If you are passionate about what you do, there will always be more interesting things to say than time to say them.
But what to leave out?
The common approach is to collect all the things you could say and then shuffle things around, deleting a bit here and a bit there … only to discover that, well, it’s still a lot.
The thing is: deleting is hard. Because when you care you care for the details, too. And when you care for something, it’s hurts to delete that thing.
But what if you didn‘t have to delete things in the first place? What if instead of leaving things out it was all about including things?
As it turns out time and again in my workshops and in my coachings, this is the most satisfying way to master complexity, both for a speaker and even more so for their audiences.
To achieve this, you don’t start by collecting all the things that you could say. Instead, you start at the endpoint. What is it that your audience absolutely needs to understand? Not the ten most important things, nor the 3 most important things? But the most important thing.
This is only one thing.
And then you’ll continue just the same way. What is now the most important thing that you need to tell your audience in order to understand this?
And then you repeat this process. What’s the most important thing to relate to this? What’s one story to visualise that?
And again. And again. And again. At each step, you’ll include exactly one thing … until you’ve reached the point of no return. The point where your audience sees clearly. The point where they want you to give them all the details. Where complexity is what they seek.
This way, you don‘t have to delete any of the details that are so near and dear to you because you have only included those details that actually matter to your audience.
